A Pearl Among Women: The Bride of the House of Núr

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family, including the memories of Ásíyih Khánum's own daughter. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

The Holy Day of the Birth of Bahá'u'lláh remembers a Child born into the house of Núr in 1817. Some twenty years later, that same house received a bride — and the story of the young woman who became Bahá'u'lláh's wife belongs, too, to the early years of His life, before exile, before prison, when He was still a young Nobleman moving among the great families of Persia.

Her name was Ásíyih Khánum. She came of a wealthy and distinguished house; her own father stood so high in the regard of the people for his open-handedness that they had given him the affectionate name of "the Father of the Poor," and her mother they called "the Mother of Consolation." She was, by every account, a noblewoman of rare quality, and her marriage to the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí, in the late 1830s, joined two families already known for their standing. Her dowry, the records tell, was lavish — befitting a daughter of such a house. Yet what those who knew her remembered was never her wealth.

The most loving portrait of her was drawn, many years afterward, by her own daughter — Bahíyyih Khánum, whom Bahá'ís revere as the Greatest Holy Leaf. The words are preserved in The Chosen Highway, and they carry the warmth of a child recalling the mother of her earliest memory. "I wish you could have seen her," the Greatest Holy Leaf said, "as I first remember her — tall, slender, graceful, eyes of a dark blue — a pearl, a flower amongst women." It is the kind of sentence that needs no embellishment: a daughter's memory of a mother who seemed to her, from the very beginning, lovelier than anyone else in the world.

Bahá'u'lláh gave her a title of His own. He called her Navváb — a name of honour — and in later years she would be known among the believers as the Most Exalted Leaf. But all of that high station lay ahead. In these first years she was simply the young wife of a young Husband in Tihrán, keeping a home, and learning what it would mean to share His life.

What she shared, from the start, was His care for the poor. Long before the world had any other name for Him, Bahá'u'lláh "had long been known in Persia as the Father of the Poor" — a title He earned, as her own father had earned it, by the plainness of His giving. The young couple's door was open. The destitute of the city were not turned away. In a household that wanted for nothing, the needy were treated as a sacred trust, and Navváb stood at her Husband's side in that work of mercy, a comforter to those who came in want — true daughter of the woman they had called the Mother of Consolation.

There is a quiet poignancy in remembering these days, because of what was coming. The years of comfort would not last. In time the storm would break over the house of Núr; the wealth would be swept away; and this same gentle noblewoman — the pearl among women, accustomed from birth to ease and abundance — would follow her Husband into poverty, into exile, into the hardships of banishment, and would bear those losses without complaint, her devotion only deepening. The open-handedness of the early years was, it turned out, a preparation: a soul that had given freely when it had much was ready to remain faithful when it had little.

So the bride who entered the house of Núr is part of the story the Birth Holy Day tells. The Child born in 1817 would grow to be a young Man of singular character, and the wife He chose would prove, in her own way, singular too — "a pearl, a flower amongst women," who left the comforts of her noble birth to become the companion of His every hardship, and who is honoured to this day among the most beloved figures of the Bahá'í Faith.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.